Contents

Varela started his military career as an enlisted man and fought in the colonial wars in the Rif for three years starting in 1909. He rose to the rank of sergeant and then enrolled at infantry school in Spain and graduated as a lieutenant.

During the early 1930s, he was assigned as a member of a military mission that spent time in Germany, Switzerland, Belgium and France to broaden their military knowledge. With the coming of the Republic, he participated in the abortive José Sanjurjo uprising in 1932 for which he was imprisoned. He was released and joined the Carlists and organized the militia or the paramilitary units of the Carlists, the Requetés, into the formidable military organization that it became in the Spanish Civil War. Disguised as a priest, Uncle Pepe, he traveled along the Pyrenean villages organizing the people and readying them for war.[1] He actively participated in the planning for the rising that started the Spanish Civil War. In April, 1936, the government found out about his plotting and imprisoned him.[2]

Ending the war with the rank of major general, he was appointed minister of war in Franco's August 1939 government and was considered a representative of the Carlist faction there.[4] During his ministry the Spanish army was purged of a small number of officers and NCOs who were considered politically unreliable.[5]

As tensions between Carlists and Falangists within the government rose during 1942, Varela suggested to Franco that Carlists were underrepresented and proposed several schemes for a reorganization of the cabinet.[7] Violence between the factions broke out at the Basilica of Begoña on August 16, 1942, when Falangists attacked a Carlist crowd with grenades, causing many injuries and possibly several deaths. Varela, who was inside the church at the time, took the initiative against the Falangists and portrayed the incident as an attack on the army and a possible assassination attempt in telegrams to officials throughout the country, displeasing Franco.[8] In the following cabinet reshuffle in September, Varela was replaced as army minister by General Carlos Asensio Cabanillas.